Americans widely back NSA phone tracking: Poll

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A solid majority of Americans support the US government's programs tracking telephone records to try to uncover terror, a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll found on Monday.

Despite US intelligence concerns raised by contractor Edward Snowden's leak of the government's monitoring of private users' Web traffic and US citizens' phone records, Americans may be surprisingly comfortable with their loss of privacy in the interest of national security.

Overall, 56 per cent of Americans told pollsters it was "acceptable" for the National Security Agency to access the telephone records of millions of Americans through secret court orders, compared to 41 percent who said it was not.

And 45 per cent said the government should be able to prod further and monitor everyone's online activity if the surveillance would prevent another terror attack like 9/11 in 2001.